THE DAILY BLADE: We Fight Them Over There So We Don’t Have To Fight Them Over Here?: Part XVIII
U.S. border guards in San Diego found unusual – and disturbing - contraband in the trunk of a Mexican BMW: Radical Muslim cleric Said Jaziri, who called for the death of a Danish cartoonist that drew pictures of the prophet Mohammed, reports The Daily Mail of London:
The 43-year-old was deported from Canada to his homeland Tunisia in 2007 after it emerged he had lied on his refugee application about having served jail time in France.
His fire and brimstone sermons and rabble-rousing antics catapulted him into the public eye during his short tenure as imam at a Montreal mosque.
He branded homosexuality a disease and led protests over cartoonist Kurt Westergaard's illustrations poked fun at Islam and were published in a Danish newspaper in 2006. …
Jaziri had allegedly paid a Tijuana-based smuggling cartel $5,000 to take him across the border near Tecate, saying he wanted to be taken to a 'safe place anywhere in the U.S.'
The driver of the BMW, Kenneth Robert Lawler, has been charged with immigrant smuggling. Jaziri is being held as a material witness in the case.
Why The Electric Car Will Be A Nonstarter
As The Washington Post's Charles Lane found himself amongst the thousands of Washington area were stick in traffic for hours during their commute home because of (yet another) winter snowstorm, he had plenty of time to think about the downside of one of President Barack Hussein Obama’s pet projects:
Being car-bound in sub-freezing weather for six hours can make a guy think. I counted my blessings. The situation could have been worse, I realized: My fellow commuters and I could have been trying to make it home in electric cars, like the ones President Obama is constantly promoting, most recently in his State of the Union address.
It is a basic fact of physical science that batteries run down more quickly in cold weather than they do in warm weather, and the batteries employed by vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf or the Chevy Volt are no exception.
The exact loss of power these cars would suffer is a matter of debate, partly because no one has much real-world experience to draw on. But there would be some loss. Running the heater to stay warm, or the car radio to stay informed, would drain the battery further. …
To be sure, gas-powered cars are hardly invulnerable. Plenty of motorists ran out of fuel in Wednesday night's mega-jam. But my hunch is that electrics would faced similar problems or worse. And many electric-car drivers who did manage to limp home Wednesday would have been out of options the next day: You can't recharge if you don't have electricity, and hundreds of thousands of customers were blacked out Thursday from the snow. The Post reports that this will be the case for many of them for days. …
Now, if the cars were cheaper than gas-powered cars of equal performance, these cold-weather risks might be acceptable. But electrics are substantially more expensive than cars of greater capability - and will be for years to come. Frankly, I don't know why anyone would consider buying one - especially if he or she lives north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Then there’s the $2,200 owners of the Nissan Leaf have to fork over to get a "home charging dock" installed in their garages – part of this cost goes to obtaining the necessary permits, and part to paying a certified electrician to hard-wire it to the circuit. Oh and plug-ins are not as “green” as hybrids like the Prius.
In Memoriam
Gladys Horton, May 30, 1945 – January 26, 2011
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